A Summer Amish Courtship (Love Inspired)

  Can they be a family for all seasons?

  A lonely schoolmaster. A widowed mother.

  Will working together be a lesson in love?

  After a sudden heartbreaking loss, young widow Abigail Stolz must somehow help her troubled son adjust—even if it means working with Jamie’s stern schoolmaster, Ethan Miller. Much to her surprise, Ethan is actually a sensitive man who is also grieving—and lonely. But will family duty and the past keep them from a chance at happiness together?

  Abigail knew her cheeks were bright red.

  “Thank you for being so nice about this, Ethan. The gossip must be embarrassing for you.”

  Ethan knitted his brows. “Are you kidding? These ladies just made my day. Apparently, I’m the most eligible Amish bachelor in Kent County.”

  He leaned forward. “And speaking of such things, a pretty, smart woman like yourself—it will only be a matter of time before someone asks to court you.” He held her gaze. “Almost makes me think I ought to—” He cut himself off.

  Abigail hesitated. He’d been about to say something, but what? She thought to press him, but then her mother took off and she had to hurry after her. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Tomorrow,” Ethan answered. “Hey, Abby. What kind of cake are you making?”

  “Lemon icebox,” she responded. She didn’t look back, but she could feel him watching her. Had he been about to ask if he could court her? Abigail’s heart gave a little pitter-patter...

  Emma Miller lives quietly in her old farmhouse in rural Delaware. Fortunate enough to have been born into a family of strong faith, she grew up on a dairy farm, surrounded by loving parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Emma was educated in local schools and once taught in an Amish schoolhouse. When she’s not caring for her large family, reading and writing are her favorite pastimes.

  Books by Emma Miller

  Love Inspired

  The Amish Spinster’s Courtship

  The Christmas Courtship

  A Summer Amish Courtship

  The Amish Matchmaker

  A Match for Addy

  A Husband for Mari

  A Beau for Katie

  A Love for Leah

  A Groom for Ruby

  A Man for Honor

  Hannah’s Daughters

  Courting Ruth

  Miriam’s Heart

  Anna’s Gift

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  A SUMMER AMISH COURTSHIP

  Emma Miller

  Two are better than one.

  —Ecclesiastes 4:9

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Dear Reader

  Excerpt from Amish Reckoning by Jocelyn McClay

  Chapter One

  “Tietscher!” eight-year-old Mary Fisher cried. She ran up the steps, her prayer kapp strings bouncing, and through the open doorway into the cloakroom of the schoolhouse. In the cold months, coats, cloaks and hats were hung on hooks on the wall. In the warmer months, it became a clutter catchall for lunch pails, fishing poles, overlooked homework and muddy boots. “Teacher, come quick!”

  Ethan Miller was busy lining up his students’ lunch boxes on two shelves he’d built and just hung on the back wall. Without the shelves, the lunch boxes, bags and pails were all over the floor and constantly being knocked over. That morning, a peanut butter and raisin bread sandwich wrapped in wax paper had ended up on the bottom of someone’s shoe and John B. had enjoyed Ethan’s egg salad for lunch. Ethan had had an apple.

  “Tietscher!” Mary exclaimed, waving both hands in the air. “It’s him again!”

  “English, please,” Ethan instructed. He slid a wrinkled brown paper sack with the name Jacob S. scrawled across it onto the lower shelf. He’d painted the shelving a dark navy blue and he had to admit, for having made it from pine scraps from his father’s woodpile, it had turned out nicely. “What’s going on?”

  The petite third grader huffed, peering at him through tiny wire-framed eyeglasses. She switched to English. “He’s going to knock it over and she’s inside!”

  Ethan liked Mary Fisher. She was a good student and was kind to the younger children, but she could also be a tattletale. Which was probably expected from a girl who was the youngest of a family of fifteen children. The Fishers ran the youth group in Hickory Grove and everyone joked that it made sense considering the fact that they had enough children to have a youth group of their own.

  Ethan looked down at Mary, trying not to be perturbed by the interruption. Not only did Mary Fisher like to tattle, but she tended to add drama to any event. A scratch on an arm became a broken bone. A boy tossing a stone could become a gang of teens throwing rocks and sticks.

  Ethan took a moment to calm his irritation. His students had been outside only ten minutes without his supervision. All he wanted to do was finish installing the shelves. How much trouble could anyone get into in ten minutes? And he’d left two fifteen-year-old girls in charge, girls who could certainly be counted on to keep an eye on younger children for a few minutes.

  Apparently they couldn’t be trusted today.

  Ethan didn’t usually have recess this late in the day. In an hour he would dismiss his students, but it was so pretty outside, and spring had been late in coming that year. The students were all eager to get out into the sunshine after such a long, cold winter. That was why he’d given them half an hour, time enough for him to hang the new shelves. His plan was to then bring his students in and have a spelling bee. It was one of the events he had planned for their end-of-the-year program, which was to include a fund-raiser, the exact nature of which had yet to be decided.

  Ethan added a tin lunch bucket to one of the shelves. “Who are we talking about, Mary?”

  “Jamie Stolz!”

  Ethan exhaled impatiently. He should have known.

  Jamie was his new student. He’d been with them only six weeks. And in those six weeks the boy had caused more turmoil than the other twenty-six students put together in his one-room schoolhouse. Ethan squinted. “What’s he going to do?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He’s rocking the girls’ outhouse,” Mary wailed, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “He’s going to knock it over and Elsie Yoder is inside!”

  “What?” Ethan looked down at the little girl, certain he’d misheard.

  Mary’s head bobbed, hands flapping. “Jamie is rocking the outhouse and he says he’s going to knock it over! With Elsie inside!”

  Ethan strode past his student. “Jamie Stolz!” he bellowed taking the schoolhouse steps two at a time. Behind the one-room building, he spotted a group of children gathered around the two outhouses that stood side by side, one for boys, one for girls. Both had small privacy fences in front of them.

  “What’s going on here?” Ethan asked, walking across the grass. Off to the left he saw several boys involved in a game of softball. To the far right, a group of teen girls huddled in a tight circle, their heads together, oblivious to the outhouse drama. His two appoin
ted guardians were among them.

  “Jamie, Teacher,” Alfie, a third grader answered morosely. He hooked his thumbs through his suspenders. “He’s being bad again.”

  Just then, a squeal arose from behind the girls’ privacy fence. “Help!”

  Ethan could see the top of the outhouse above the fence. It didn’t appear to be rocking. But then he’d dug the foundations for the new outhouses the previous summer so he knew they were pretty stable.

  “Elsie?” Ethan called.

  “Teacher!” she shrieked.

  Ethan halted at the little fence and peered under it. He didn’t see Jamie.

  Ethan hesitated, not sure what to do. It wouldn’t be proper of him to go to the outhouse door with the little girl inside. “Elsie, just come out here!”

  “I can’t get out!” Elsie shrieked. “Door’s stuck!”

  “Jamie? Where are you?” Ethan called sternly. Then he heard a loud rapping on the rear wall of the outhouse.

  Elsie began to cry.

  “Mary Judith!” Ethan called in the direction of the cluster of teen girls who were still unaware of what was going on. “Could you come get your sister?”

  The blonde teen with a blue scarf tied on her head looked up in surprise to hear her name and then hurried toward him.

  “Go see if you can get your sister out,” Ethan instructed. He turned around to the other students gathered in a semicircle. They were all talking at once. One of his first graders was crying. “Recess is over,” he declared, pointing toward the schoolhouse. “Inside. Peter, get the boys off the ball field,” he told one of his more responsible students.

  Then, as Mary Judith walked behind the privacy fence, Ethan headed for the rear of the outhouses, which were on the edge of a small copse of trees. The woods were just beginning to spring to life and everywhere were shoots of new green leaves. “Jamie!” he called. “Jamie Stolz!”

  Ethan came around the corner to see blond-haired Jamie shoving a thick branch between the girls’ outhouse and its foundation. “Jamie,” he barked just as the boy prepared to leap on the branch. And rock the outhouse again.

  “Yes?” the little boy asked, taking a stumbling step back.

  “I have her, Teacher,” Mary Judith called from the other side of the outhouse. “Someone put a stick through the latch!”

  “Everyone inside!” Ethan ordered again to the stragglers who’d not heard or obeyed his first command, trying not to transfer his displeasure with Jamie to the other children. He imagined they were as frustrated with the boy as he was. He was a constant disruption in the classroom: talking, throwing bits of paper, rocking loudly in his chair. And on the playground, he spent most of his time teasing younger children. “Everyone in the schoolhouse. Now, please.” He turned back to his errant student. “Jamie, why would you do this?”

  The boy tucked his hands behind his back. He was wearing denim pants, a pale blue shirt, suspenders and a straw hat. He looked like the other male students, yet he didn’t. Most boys in Hickory Grove wore hand-me-downs. The clothes Jamie wore, though homemade like everyone else’s, were all brand-spanking-new.

  Ethan grabbed the stick Jamie had shoved under the outhouse and tossed it into the woods. “How did Elsie get locked inside?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ethan pressed his lips together and glanced away, trying to calm the anger rising from his chest. If there was one thing he couldn’t abide, it was a liar. He returned his gaze to his new student. “Did you lock Elsie in the outhouse?”

  The boy stared at the ground.

  “Why were you trying to tip it over?” Ethan pressed. “Jamie, if the outhouse had tipped over with her inside, Elsie could have been seriously hurt.”

  Jamie kicked at a pile of acorns on the ground. “I wasn’t going to knock it over. Too heavy. I was just rocking it.”

  Ethan exhaled, looking away again. He was momentarily unsure what to do. He’d certainly encountered mischief since he’d accepted the job of the Hickory Grove schoolmaster two years ago, but it always had been the same sort of innocent naughtiness: frogs in lunch pails, the snapping of suspenders, the tugging of kapp strings. Until Jamie’s arrival, the biggest problem he’d had was little boys arriving at school late because they stopped along the way to throw rocks in a pond.

  Ethan looked at Jamie. “Have you something to say for yourself?” He opened his arms wide. “Anything?”

  The boy concentrated on his new leather boots that looked as if they’d never been in a barn.

  Ethan thought for a moment. He’d already talked with Jamie’s widowed mother three times in the last six weeks. Three times! That was more than he’d spoken to other parents since September.

  Abigail Stolz seemed like a nice enough woman. Though each time he approached her she was defensive, suggesting it was he who was responsible for her son’s misbehavior. As if a schoolmaster was solely in charge of his students’ discipline. And she was forward for an Amish woman, which had annoyed him the first time he met her, then amused him the second time. Truth was, she reminded him a lot of his stepsister Lovey, a woman who wasn’t shy about speaking her mind. And he adored Lovey.

  Ethan glanced down at Jamie. He didn’t see any way out of this. He knew what he needed to do. “Get in my buggy,” he ordered. With the warmer weather, he’d started walking to school again. It was less than a mile’s walk if he cut across the fields, less than two if he took the road home. He’d only brought the buggy this morning because he’d intended to run into Byler’s store after school and order a piece of stovepipe. He and his father were installing a woodstove to keep their shop warm where they were making a buggy.

  Jamie looked up at Ethan. “What?”

  “I said get in my buggy. I’ll send one of the big boys out to hitch up Butter.” Butter was his horse. Her name was Butterscotch. His dead wife had named her that after they bought the dun at an auction. She had said the mare was the color of her homemade butterscotch pudding. His Mary had teased him that the mare wasn’t the proper color for an Amish man’s buggy, but Ethan had bought her anyway. Because his Mary had liked her. He’d been razzed for years about the color of his driving horse and her name. He didn’t care. She was one of the few things he had left of his wife.

  “I don’t understand,” Jamie said. His English was excellent. Often children started school with no knowledge of the English language. In Kent County, Delaware, children usually strictly spoke Pennsylvania Deitsch—a form of German, not Dutch, as many Englishers mistakenly thought they used—in their homes, so it was up to the schoolmaster to teach them English. Ethan had been concerned when Jamie had arrived from out of state that he would have come from a school where the children were taught in Pennsylvania Deitsch. It happened in some places. But his concerns had been quickly dispelled; Jamie spoke English as well as Ethan did. And his diction might have been better.

  “What do you not understand?” Ethan asked, beginning to lose his patience again. He was exasperated that the boy wasn’t better behaved and exasperated with himself that he wasn’t able to get him to act better. He was also annoyed with the child’s mother. It was evident that she wasn’t disciplining him. “I want you to get in my buggy and wait for me. I’m dismissing everyone early. And I’m taking you home.” He pointed at the boy. “So I can speak to your mother. Again.”

  Jamie met Ethan’s gaze and he thrust out his lower lip. “You’re being mean to me. Everyone here is mean to me. I don’t like this school.”

  “Jamie, no one is—” Ethan halted midsentence. There was no sense arguing with a nine-year-old. He knew better. And at this point, this was a matter for his mother to deal with. And if she couldn’t, then...then he’d just expel the boy. Maybe that would get Abigail Stolz’s attention.

  * * *

  “Buggy!” Abigail’s mother announced from the back door. “Babby! Buggy coming!”

 
“Are you expecting someone?” Abigail asked, walking away from the kitchen sink as she dried her hands on a towel, a red-and-white one with a rooster on it. It wasn’t a Plain towel; it wasn’t the kind most Amish women had in their homes. But her mother had spotted it at Spence’s Bazaar the previous week and had made such a fuss about wanting it that Abigail’s father had bought it for her.

  “It’s not Plain,” Abigail had argued under her breath as they’d gotten into line to pay for it. “We’re new to Hickory Grove still, Dat. What will our bishop think?”

  “What will he think?” he had asked as he peeled off dollar bills from a wad in his pocket that he kept together with a rubber band from a bunch of bananas. “He’ll think I’m a husband who indulges his wife once in a while. That’s what he’ll think.”

  “But it’s red, Daddi,” Abigail had murmured.

  “That’s why she likes it,” he had whispered back with a smile.

  Abigail walked to the back door and peered out the window. There actually was a buggy approaching. It was not one of her mother’s false alarms. Abigail didn’t recognize the horse, though. It was a pretty light brown, almost caramel shade. Not the color horse one often saw pulling an Amish buggy. “Cover your head, Mam,” she instructed absently, still watching out the window.

  June’s hands flew to the tight bun of thin hair that had grayed long ago. “Where’s my kapp, Babby? Someone’s taken my kapp.”

  “No one’s taken your kapp. You’ve put it somewhere and I can’t find it. It’s been missing since morning.”

  Abigail walked into the mudroom that was off the kitchen and grabbed a dark blue scarf from a rusty nail in the wall. Her father had finished a lot of work in the last eight months since he and Abigail’s mother had bought the property, but there was still a lot to be done. One item on Abigail’s lengthy to-do list was to add pegs to the walls in the mudroom that also served as a laundry room. It just seemed uncivilized to her, to be hanging coats and cloaks and hats on nails.